


Denial

by TheGreatLibraryFangirl (Mazeem)



Series: Gaps in Canon [2]
Category: The Great Library Series - Rachel Caine
Genre: Child Neglect, Dario is a mess, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Khalila and Dario bonding, Migraine, Set during canon era, Stomach Ache, Vomiting, chock full of headcanon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-07-30 08:46:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20094526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mazeem/pseuds/TheGreatLibraryFangirl
Summary: Dario doesn't want Khalila to see him during this miserable night. It's not even that she probably, unfortunately, still doesn't like him. It's that he's curled up with a bin full of vomit in the Ptolemy House common room and he's not even drunk.No-one has ever helped him. He's got no reason to think that will change.





	1. Ink and Bone

**Author's Note:**

> This is the start of a one chapter per book fic where I bundle together headcanons about Khalila and Dario's relationship, and Dario's family through the lens of giving Dario a particular condition. (To be revealed in chapter 2)

When Dario woke in the night with a terrible stomach ache, his first reaction was a wave of disappointment and self-loathing so strong that he bit his lip hard against the sudden childish desire to cry.

_I thought I’d grown out of this. I thought I was better than this now._

He tried to lie still and go back to sleep, but, really, that was wishful thinking. He knew exactly how this went from long, miserable childhood episodes, and he was stuck with it.

Going to the toilet never helped, but he always tried it anyway. Despite trying his best to be silent, the pain made him clumsy and he walked into the bathroom doorway, hard. 

No change in Jess’ deep breathing. Thank fuck.

He sat on the toilet and hugged himself and tried not to make any noise. Tried to think through the pain that had dulled his mind down to, “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.”

Well, he couldn’t make it stop. And he couldn’t stay here - he already felt sick and soon the vomiting would begin and there was no chance Jess would sleep through _that_. 

The thought of Jess seeing him like, after that humiliation earlier over that game of Go, was momentarily more painful than the blunt claws digging into his stomach. 

Maybe if he dragged a comfortable chair from the common room into the dining area, he could take advantage of comfort _and_ proximity to a sink to vomit in. He’d have to clean it thoroughly afterwards, but that was doable. 

Except even the thought of physically dragging a big, heavy armchair anywhere made his nausea swell. 

No. No, don’t you _fucking_ dare. Breathe in. Breathe out. Don’t throw up yet. 

Fine. Get out of the room first, figure something out later. He got to his feet. 

The door to the corridor creaked as he opened it, and he held his breath. Normally, he didn’t care about waking Jess. Sometimes he even made a game out of it. But this was different. He couldn’t bear Jess to see him like this, bent double and breathing so, so carefully.

It felt like his stomach was turning itself inside out and oozing acid into his guts The fact that the pain was familiar didn’t help.

He reached the common room, and the comfortable seats drew him like a magnet. One had a bin next to it. That would do. 

His stomach twisted and his throat squeezed shut, but he stubbornly held it down and refused to even breathe until he was seated, curled in a ball with the bin tucked awkwardly between his body and the arm of the chair. 

_Then_ he threw up. 

It was disgusting, as usual. It didn't help, as usual. 

He shut his eyes and tried to put his mind somewhere else. Not sleep, that never worked, but just … somewhere. 

_I told you you’d find the Library too stressful, Dario_, his father’s voice said, disinterested.

Oh, great. Not there, brain. Of all the possible memories to retrieve, he didn’t want to listen to his father. 

_It’s _not_ too stressful_, he thought, nice and safe in his head where he could talk back to his father without being made to regret it._ It’s fine. I’m still here, after ten people have been kicked out. I’m doing well. _

His stomach throbbed and he curled up tighter and imagined his father’s smug little eyebrow raise.

_You’ve always had a weak stomach, son. Always been unable to handle stress. Your precious Library can’t change that_.

_Go and fuck yourself_, he thought, as he burrowed his face into the crook of his arm.**  
**

He threw up again, already down to the shitty painful stage when there was no food left and not even much liquid. Just thick bile. Jesus, this was going to be terrible. 

Someone’s bedroom door opened down the hall, and he froze. Wild impulses to hide shuddered through him, but the very thought of trying to uncurl made him feel light-headed. 

It wasn’t Jess. The footsteps were different. Thank God for small mercies.

The footsteps came closer. A face poked around the doorway. Oh, fuck. It was Khalila. 

“I thought I heard you.” She had a loose silky robe wrapped around her, and creases in her headscarf from the previous day where she had obviously hastily re-wrapped it. 

“Sorry,” he said. He was suddenly horribly aware of the stink of vomit in the room, and the way her face screwed up at it. 

“You really shouldn’t drink like that.” She entered the room fully, and perched on the arm of a chair to stare at him. “It’s not good for you.”

“I’m not drunk,” he protested. She raised one eyebrow. He could understand her scepticism; she’d watched him work his way methodically through two bottles of cheap ruby port just the other night, as everyone else had gradually drifted away to bed. 

Eventually she had, too, at her carefully prescribed bed-time, leaving him alone. He must have done the same at some point, because he’d woken up in bed fully dressed and fuzzy-headed.

“I don’t know how you’ve managed to get away with it for so long,” she said, frowning. “Wolfe can tell, you know. You’re sabotaging your own chances.”

The echo of that hit him in the chest. 

_It’s like you don’t want to succeed, __mijo__, _his mother had told him so many times. 

“You sound like my fucking mother,” Dario snapped in response. It was sharper than he’d intended – more sharply than he’d ever spoken directly to Khalila before. Understandably she bristled.

“Well, it’s a pity that you still need mothering, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t_ ask_ you to mother me! Why are you even here?” His stomach seized his attention again even as he responded, and he struggled to keep his gaze fixed on Khalila. 

She shrugged. “I happened to be awake. I heard you being sick.”

He forced a smile. It felt flat and toothy. An enamel gate to stop himself from groaning with pain. “Aw, you do care. Interrupting your precious sleep schedule to tend to my needs.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, shut up.” She folded her hands in her lap primly. “Even me nagging you like your mother isn’t enough to put you off harassing me, is it?” 

“You wouldn’t be sat here if you didn’t like it,” he countered clumsily. He shifted to hug his stomach more tightly, and saw her watch him do it. She saw everything, of course.

“If you’re not drunk,” she said, and suddenly her voice was softer, “then what’s wrong?”

What’s wrong? What a question. He sank his teeth into his bottom lip until the sharp pain softened the twisting knot of emotion suddenly wedged in his throat. 

“It’s just a stomach thing. It’s nothing.”

“From bad food?” 

He shook his head. “No. And it’s not an illness. You can’t catch it. Don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t worrying.” She slid off the arm of the chair and onto the seat in a lithe movement that he watched for decidedly too long. 

As if to punish him for that, his stomach throbbed and his gorge rose again and he retched, and this time he couldn’t stop himself from groaning as he wiped his mouth and swallowed. His throat burned.

“Are you in pain?” 

The concern in her voice hurt. He gritted his teeth. In hindsight, he’d liked it better when she was asking the wrong questions. Now it felt like she was forensically peeling layers away from him. 

He felt small and pathetic enough as it was, without the weight of her eyes on him to witness it.

Oh God, he’d left it too long to answer and now she was talking again: “You’re very pale, Dario. You don’t look well at all.”

“Mm.” The bin was over half full. He needed to do something about that, but he couldn’t summon the motivation. “It’s fine. I’m used to it.” He curled one hand up to prod at his knotted neck muscles. “It won’t last that long. I’ll be fine by morning.”

“Would medication help?” 

He stared at her with his dry, sticky lips agape. 

She tilted her head, curious, then when he didn’t,_ couldn’t_, reply, continued as if he merely needed clarification, “I have a good supply of analgesic potions in my room, for menstrual cramps. Would you like me to bring you one?” 

“I don’t …”

_I don’t deserve medication. _

Memories boomed.

_You’re not really in pain, boy, it’s all in your head. _

_Don’t take so much of those, _ _mijo_ _, you’ll make yourself dependent._

_Push through it, for heaven’s sake. Stop running to your room every time you feel a little delicate._

_Just stay calm and be confident and it’ll fade, you’ll see._

_You’re just making a fuss over nothing._

“Dario?” 

He blinked at Khalila’s voice, and found that he was breathing fast.

Tears were stinging his eyes, although they hadn’t yet fallen. Thank fuck for small mercies.

“Sorry.” He snatched a quick breath and held it. Felt his heart beating like a frightened rabbit in his chest. Get a _fucking grip_. 

“It’s fine. I’ll go and get you a vial.” She clasped her knees to stand.

He couldn’t bear her kindness. Not when he was lying.

The words burst out of him like yet more bile, foul and awful and yet strangely relieving. “It’s only stress.” He let his gaze slip away from her and rest blurrily on the carpet as his heart raced so loudly in his ears that he could barely hear himself continue. “It’s nothing. It’s just my body being,” _weak, pathetic, pitiful, inadequate, worthless, useless_, “stupid. It’ll go.”

You don’t need to help me. You won’t want to help me, now.

“I’m not surprised you’re stressed,” she said softly, and his heart quailed even as his fists clenched. Had his father been right all along? Was his softness obvious, no matter what he did? 

It took him a moment or two to focus externally enough to hear her as she carried on. “… and Glain’s not sleeping well, and Izumi thinks she’s hiding how little she’s eating and Allah only knows what Jess is doing at night–”

“But not you, though,” he interrupted, before she could talk more about Jess, of all people. Heat rose in him. ‘Of course you’re stressed.’ He needed to put a dent in her somehow. “You’re not stressed. You’re _fine_.” He spat it at her like a curse.

Her eyes widened, then a complicated expression flashed across her face. “As I said before. I was brought up in a similar environment to this.” Her hands were back to being primly folded in her lap. “Not such high stakes, perhaps, nor such, hmm, _intensity_ from the teacher, but rote memorisation and daily tests are familiar to me.”

“Wolfe isn’t intense, he’s insane,” Dario grumbled. Khalila raised both eyebrows briefly, but said nothing. “You’re something else, though. You know you are.”

Temper flashed in her eyes and she leaned forwards in her chair. “What do you want me to admit to, Dario? Do you think my entrance score will matter in ten years, if my scholarship is inadequate? I want to make my family proud. I want to feel like I’m making a difference. I don’t want to be merely a footnote in Library history.”

Her gaze was fierce and hot and he couldn’t hold it. 

“Don’t mention footnotes and Library history in the sleeping hours,” he mumbled nonsensically, scrubbing at the damp corners of his eyes with his sleeve. 

She sighed. 

Silence fell for a moment.

It could have been stored away in Dario’s memory as a comfortable silence, or even a companionable one, except that his body betrayed him and made him throw up again. Not exactly an attractive mating call, that. 

“Here.” He looked up just a little from the wretched contents of the bin to see Khalila’s outstretched hand offering him a handkerchief. He blinked at it for a moment.

“Thanks.” He dabbed his eyes and forehead, where he had broken out in a cold sweat, then reached out to hand it back.

“Wipe your mouth.”

He looked up and met her eyes again, out of sheer shock. Her expression was composed again. 

“But my mouth is disgusting,” he protested. She rolled her eyes.

“Blow your nose, too. Wash it and give me it back later.” Her expression softened and warmed. “Don’t deny yourself things that you need. I’ll get that vial.”

He watched her body shift under her robe as she got up from the chair, because apparently nothing short of actual unconsciousness was going to stop him being … appreciative. 

Obediently, he wiped his mouth and blew his nose on her handkerchief. There was a brilliant line hiding somewhere in his brain about the medieval tradition of women giving their suitors tokens in the tradition of courtly love. He’d dig it out and polish it off and say it when he gave her the handkerchief back. In front of Jess. Ha.

He couldn’t get too far into reconstructing his sense of pride, though, his stomach was too bad for that. Especially now that his distraction had disappeared. 

She’d be back soon. No time to try and refocus himself again. Just breathe through it, Dario. He closed his eyes and counted the ticks from the clock on the wall. 

It lulled him a little. Thank God.

Less than two minutes later, he heard her footsteps return. Heard them falter, just as he forced his eyes open again.

“Are you-“

“I’m awake.” Dazed, just for a second, he watched her, framed in the doorway. More beautiful than any religious painting he’d ever seen. 

She looked back at him expectantly, then raised the vial in her hand and walked towards him. 

“I wasn’t entirely sure which one to bring. You look in a lot of pain, but if you don’t often take this …”

He took the vial from her. His fingers were trembling, but he was functional. “So this won’t kill me if I drink it, then?” He grinned up at her. “Seems a complicated way to knock down the numbers.”

“Oh, shut up.” She scrunched her face up in thought. It was adorable. “It might have a sedative effect, I suppose.”

He eyed it warily. The liquid inside the stoppered glass vial was thick and cloudy. “What, an _immediate_ sedative effect?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t really know. I’m very used to it, I’m afraid. But you should go back to bed anyway, so …” She spread her hands and adopted an innocent look as Dario glared. He couldn’t keep up the pretence of annoyance for long, though. 

“And this will work, right?”

“It should do.”

_And I can take it, right? And it will make me stop hurting and I am _allowed_ to take it and no-one’s going to make me feel like I failed?_

He didn’t say any of that. But he thought it, fast and urgent, and his fingers trembled even more as he reached for the stopper. 

“May I?” She didn’t wait for an answer before her warm, soft fingers covered his. He could feel writing calluses on her middle finger. 

… This was getting stored away for, uh, later. He’d embraced being a shit-stain of a human a long time ago. 

Not quite wanting to look her in the eye after _that_ thought, he downed the contents of the vial. 

Then slapped one hand over his mouth and retched again.

She looked at him with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

“Oh yes, and it’s disgusting.”

He shut his eyes and fought the foul mixture down, past his over-sensitised gag reflex and into his roiling stomach. 

The liquid was horribly bitter and thick, and seemed to have settled in a layer over his tongue. At least the texture was smooth. Count your blessings, Dario. 

“_Mierda__!_ _Hostia_ _puta__!_” he said in a thick whisper. He rolled his eyes at her in mute outrage. She giggled, but then her expression smoothed out.

“That should help the pain.”

When was the last time anyone had said that to him? Taken this seriously enough to want to help? And she barely knew him and certainly didn’t like him very much, and she’d just done it because … because she was nice like that, he supposed.

“Thank you.” That seemed wholly inadequate. There was court etiquette for this sort of gratitude, but it all involved standing and moving, and just getting up to go to bed was going to be difficult enough. 

She waved a hand. “It’s just a bit of medicine-“

“No. Please. Khalila.” He pressed a fist to his chest and bowed his head. When he raised it again, her eyes were very wide. She returned the gesture, and stared at him for a moment. He watched her silently, waiting to see what she had to say. Watched the tension build in her shoulders, and the fire spark in her eyes again. 

“Whoever denied you this simple relief was _wrong_.”

She spun on her heel and stalked away. He heard her breath in and out, hard. “Now, go to bed, before you fall asleep in that chair and Jess finds you when he comes down early in the morning.”

Oh, fuck _that_. He moved the bin to the floor and, wincing, hunching over, clambered to his feet.

He knew he was being blatantly manipulated, but still. Fuck that. Not after last night. 

“Empty the bin!” she called over her shoulder, as she slipped through the common room doorway.

By the time that he had obediently emptied and rinsed the bin in the dining room clean-up area, the contents of the vial were starting to kick in. The pain was much lessened, but sudden fatigue made him even more clumsy as he stumbled back to his room. 

The bedroom door slammed open. He didn’t care.

He turned off his alarm as he tumbled into bed. Jess could shower before him tomorrow.  



	2. Paper & Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dario discovers that the problem isn't all in his head, while Khalila is reminded of how much he means to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is so long omg. I have given up on making it 'perfect', so you're all getting 'good enough' instead.
> 
> is it even a coherent narrative  
probably not
> 
> enjoy!

Khalila was supremely unimpressed with Dario. They’d had today booked in for weeks as a joint research session in the Reading Room, with access to rare old originals.

He’d not met her at her office, and after waiting for a while she’d gone on the hunt.

He wasn’t in the breakfast hall. 

Next step, his office, in case he’d gone there briefly and Scholar Prakesh had ambushed him with something urgent.

“Good morning, Scholar Prakesh. Is Dario there?” she asked. The Scholar shook her head, then held up a finger. She wrote on the Blank she was holding, then turned it to Khalila.

I’m not expecting him in today. He’s supposed to be working with you in the Reading Room with that interesting Pythagorean text, isn’t he?

Khalila nodded. “Yes, Archytas’ mechanics; thank you for agreeing to lend him to me, Scholar.” She bobbed a little bow, then sighed heavily. “We agreed to meet half an hour ago. I’ll go and check his room. Thank you.” She signed the thanks as she said it and turned away without waiting for a farewell, but Scholar Prakesh clicked her fingers for attention and she turned back, chastened at her own rudeness. 

Don’t jump to the worst conclusion, dear.

She bristled at that, but tried to hide it. Scholar Prakesh viewed Dario very fondly, if with understandable exasperation. Treating Dario as her substitute grandson unfortunately also included having opinions on his wider life. 

“Thank you, Scholar.” She gave herself a little mental shake. Be polite, Khalila. “Will you be getting an interpreter for today?”

Scholar Prakesh’s eye roll was elaborate and contained a novel’s worth of information. She turned and propped the Blank against the doorframe as she wrote so that Khalila could see her words as they were written – the closest thing she could do to a true back-and-forth. 

_ In theory, yes. In reality, I’m sure my request will languish somewhere conveniently for a few days and be cursorily addressed only when it’s no longer necessary. _

“Well, that’s not fair,” Khalila said hotly. Scholar Prakesh’s answering smile was long-suffering.

_ Most signers in this building are hearing, Scholar Seif. Priorities. Scholars consider it an extra burden to their workday. Servants ask for extra money. And, of course, _ she turned and gave Khalila a look that immediately made her face go hot _ , none of them are as handsome as Dario. _

Khalila fought the urge to fan her face. At times like these Scholar Prakesh reminded her far too much of her own grandmother. 

“Why did you let me borrow him?” she demanded, concerned. She hadn’t realised that was the situation. Did Dario know? “It’s not vital. Your unimpeded communication is more -“ She stopped as Scholar Prakesh lifted her finger again. 

_ My old hands can manage scribbling for one day, Scholar Seif. _

Khalila clenched her hands into fists inside her sleeve at the gentle admonishment. “Of course.” She bowed again. “I’ll keep looking for him, then.”

Her head was still whirling from that whiplash of a conversation as she trotted down the stairs, so when she nearly walked into a Scholar coming up the other way, it took her a second to realise it was Dario, and then she blurted,

“You look awful!” His hair was un-brushed, his eyes were sleepy and she could actually still see bedlinen creases on his cheek.

“Thank you for your oh-so kind greeting, my flower,” he muttered, and rubbed his face.

“You knew we had an important day today,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “Are you hungover? Is that why you overslept?” 

“No.” He yawned widely. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe Stavropol wine is even shittier than people say. I swear to you, I had two glasses yesterday and that was it. I just slept badly.” 

She tilted her head to one side and examined him for a second. He didn’t look drunk – more pitiful than drunk – but there was something odd in his articulation. 

Never mind. They’d have to make the best of it.

“Come on, then. Let’s go.”

He lagged behind her the whole walk, and when she started up the Serapeum steps, she heard him suck in a breath.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “Shall we take the lift?”

He nodded. “Need more coffee to cope with those stairs.”

When they reached the Reading Room, they signed their names in the Codex by the entrance and a silver band Scholar disappeared into a temperature-controlled side-room and brought out the original.

Khalila accepted the original, while Dario was given a Blank pre-loaded with handling instructions.

“We know all this stuff already,” he complained as they found a nice table near the window. “Don’t touch it with your bare hands, weight it down rather than press on it, make sure it’s fully supported on a flat table … Do they think we’re idiots?”

Ooh, he was grumpy today.

“It never hurts to have a checklist,” Khalila said absentmindedly, already eyeing the protectively wrapped text in her hands.

“You would say that.”

She laid the text in the middle of the table and unwrapped it and regarded it for a moment with quiet awe. This pre-dated the Great Library.

The two and a half thousand year old parchment was tanned with age and crackling at the edges. The ink, thankfully, still looked quite legible. 

Dario’s hands flexed in the corner of her vision, and she couldn’t blame him. She hoped the thrill of seeing an ancient original like this would never wear off. 

She settled down to work; one special graphite-sensitive Blank to make notes without worrying about ink, and her Codex to research anything that came up. Dario had much the same, except he also put down a third Blank which was set to a glossary of Ancient Greek mathematical terms.

“Not done your research?” she asked him with a smile.

“Don’t need research when I’ve got you, do I?” He grinned back, then yawned. “I’m going to get a coffee, do you want one?”

They obviously couldn’t drink the coffee at their table, but there was a little station on the other side of the room which saw healthy business in espresso at all times of the day or night.

“Go on, then.”

They made notes in companionable silence for nearly an hour (Khalila paying attention to the ancient mechanics and Dario comparing the text to later historians’ references and squinting at the handwriting), until Dario reached for his inkpot and knocked it over instead.

Khalila had more than half expected that to happen, so she managed to catch the pot as it was tipping. That knocked the trajectory of the liquid towards Dario, and he sent his chair skidding backwards as he tried to avoid it.

Khalila used her sleeve to dab the few drops of ink from the table, and checked frantically that the original parchment wasn’t affected. She could barely breathe with terror – both for the state of the irreplaceable original and the fact that any such damage would likely destroy both their careers before they had even begun.

“Dario-”

“I know! I know! Is it intact?”

She checked again. “It seems to be.”

Dario let out a ragged sigh and sat heavily back down in his chair. “Thank fuck.” He put his head in his hands for a moment.

“Why do you even _ have _ ink?” Khalila said, not quite able to help herself.

“We’re allowed ink!” he snarled back defensively. “And I hate pencil. It’s scratchy.” He sat back in his chair. Khalila noticed that he was pale and looked even more exhausted than before. 

“Take a break,” she suggested. “You’ll miss things if you’re tired enough to make you clumsy.”

“Mm.” He flexed his hand and frowned at it. “Missed the fucking ink pot, more to the point.” His hand seemed slow to open and close, Khalila noticed. He sighed. “I’d get another coffee except I don’t think that would help my headache.”

“No more coffee!” she said. “You’ve had three in an hour, on top of no breakfast and bad sleep. No wonder you’re feeling a bit off.”

He blew out a breath. “Of course. You’re probably right. As usual.” He eyed his hand again. After a quick look around the mostly empty Reading Room, Khalila reached out and covered his hand with her own. 

“Go and get some water and then put your head down for a little while.”

He rolled his eyes, then winced and sucked his breath in. “Oh yeah, that’ll look good. Asleep instead of working.”

“Look good to who?” Khalila gestured with her other hand to the rest of the room. Dario looked from her pointing to where their hands rested together, and managed a ghost of his usual smirk. _ Oh, that’s why _, it seemed to say. Khalila went a little hot, but fought the urge to glare at him when he didn’t deserve it.

He got up and, after a moment’s hesitation with his hand on the back of the chair, went off to get water like she’d advised. 

She tried to return to where she’d left off in her tentative notes on her hypothesised model, but it was difficult to concentrate. She felt doubly sorry for Dario; not only for clearly feeling awful, but for missing out on this opportunity. Unless she, or Scholar Prakesh, could think of a compelling reason to book the text out again, as a low level silver band he would have to wait months to be allotted a slot for his own research. 

He came back and sat down even more heavily than before.

“Could you shut the blinds a bit? Sorry. My head’s killing me.”

“Of course.” She lowered the blinds, then pulled a glow from her bag to use that instead. Dario was the one who needed natural light, to examine the exact impression of the ancient scribe’s writing implement; she would be fine as long as she could still read. 

“Thanks, _ bebe _,” he mumbled as he dropped his head onto his folded arms.

Again, she restrained herself. She really, really hated that particular endearment. She wasn’t a baby. 

(“You know I’m not literally calling you … look, no-one complained before!” he’d complained with a bewildered look the second and, up until now, last time he’d used it for her.

“Am I the same as your previous relationships?”

“Most certainly not.”

“Well, then.”)

Perhaps fifteen minutes passed. She was now completely distracted and peering at Dario every couple of minutes, noting his pained, definitely not sleeping, breathing. 

She still wasn’t prepared for him to suddenly sit up, prop his head on his hands, and mumble,

“I’m going to be sick.”

She grabbed the tray with the original on and stood, getting it out of the way. “Right now?”

He shook his head and she relaxed a fraction. 

“I’ll find you something.” Heart beating rapidly, she deposited the original on a nearby table. She couldn’t see a bin or anything immediately - and oh, thank Allah, her frantic looking around had attracted the attention of the Scholar in charge of the room. 

“Is something the -”

“Dario is going to be sick, I need a receptacle,” she interrupted the Scholar, rudely and informally eschewing Dario’s title for the sheer time saving number of syllables. 

Panic flashed across the Scholar’s face. “What? In here?” To Khalila’s relief, he spun on his heel and disappeared behind his desk, emerging a second later with a small bin. “You’ll have to take him out of here, please,” he said, as he handed it to Khalila. 

Khalila nodded, barely listening, and almost ran back to Dario. 

“Bin,” she announced, shoving it underneath his chin, at which point he promptly threw up. 

Well. That coffee hadn’t got very far. 

She rubbed his back. “Well done. Sorry I took so long.”

Pale and throwing up. She’d seen this before. Into a bin, too. 

“Is it your stomach problem?” she asked, as he finished sucking in air and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

“No.” One hand came up to take hold of the edge of the bin, but the other stayed on his lap. Khalila eyed it warily. Same hand as before. 

“Stomach’s fine. Head hurts.”

He sounded drunk all of a sudden, his words coming out slurred and heavily Spanish-accented. 

This was all adding up to something extremely scary all of a sudden. 

“Dario, can you look up at me? Just for a moment?” She felt the breathe shudder in and out of him as he did so. He didn’t seem to be able to look her in the eye. 

She studied his face. The whole of his face was slack and dull with pain, so she couldn’t tell, but -

\- but Dario was very, very clever and he just hadn’t put two and two together alongside her because his priorities had been elsewhere -

\- and she saw the realisation of why she was scrutinising him slam into him like a punch.

He physically jerked backwards in his chair, his expression contorting into terror. She grabbed the bin to stop its unpleasant contents spilling everywhere.

“Dario-”

“This is not a stroke,” he said. He was enunciating with a great deal of effort, but to very little avail. He tried to lift his dysfunctional hand, and succeeded, to a point, then put his good hand to his forehead and groaned. 

“Excuse me, Scholars, could you leave the room if you’re feeling unwell?” 

Khalila completely ignored the stupid Reading Room Scholar, and briefly entertained a fantasy of kicking his kneecap sideways from her crouched position. 

Dario _ did _ listen. She couldn’t let go of the stupid bin quickly enough to grab his shoulders. 

He mumbled an incoherent apology and got to his feet, at which point the leg on the same side as his hand crumpled underneath him and he fell to the floor.

The Reading Room Scholar let out a shocked gasp. Khalila whipped her head round and snapped at him:

“Get a Medica up here. Urgently. He needs to be taken down to the medical base. Tell them it’s a suspected stroke.”

The man didn’t move immediately, and Khalila was a hair's-breadth from shoving him, when Dario moved and her attention re-centered without her even realising. 

“It can’t be a stroke. This is my fucking dominant hand.” He sat up, with her help and some difficulty. She could only understand him because she’d heard him speak while truly black-out drunk once before. 

Despite the stubborn denial and protests, he was visibly terrified; his eyes were wide and damp, his hands were trembling and he was breathing rapidly. No matter what was wrong, panicking like that wasn’t good for him.

She blinked away her own panicked tears and took one of his hands in both of hers.

“It might not be a stroke.” _ Insha’Allah _, it might not be a stroke. “Neither of us are Medica. But will you forgive me for wanting to make sure?”

He made an agreeing sound through his nose and rested his head against the back of the plush chair. His hand in hers was wet with perspiration.

“It could be a trapped nerve. Or the way you were sitting - maybe you’re in for a monster case of pins and needles soon. Or perhaps, surprise, surprise, your body disagrees with you drowning it in caffeine as its only source of nutrition after a bad night’s sleep.” She forced a smile, and stroked his forearm. “Breathe with me. It might help, and it definitely can’t hurt.”

Or maybe it’s a seizure, her brain rattled off with its usual ability for recall and pattern recognition, or a brain tumour, or a brain infection, or – shut up, _ shut up _.

He watched her silently, squinting like it hurt him to do so. He had always been more interested in the Medica side of their training than she had, and his was a pessimistic personality anyway so his brain was doubtless regurgitating the same negative possibilities at him as hers had, but to her surprise and gratitude he let her guide his breathing and help him calm down a little.

It helped keep her calm, too. Outwardly, at least.

He was precious to her, this strange, often frustrating, always determinedly arrogant Spaniard. They hadn’t quite figured it all out yet, all their very different expectations around this commitment to each other, but every time she saw him or received a Codex message, it brightened her day. Every time he touched her, even the lightest brush of his fingertips, it felt significant. A sharing of himself, given with an easy grace that she wished she could reciprocate in the same way. 

The idea that he might be taken from her, for any reason, even simply to convalesce for a time, felt like her blood had been replaced with icy thorns.

She couldn’t let it show. One of them had to stay calm. She dropped briefly into silent prayer, to express her fears and seek strength.

When the Medicas arrived in the elevator, she got her legs underneath her to stand and greet them, only to have Dario grab her wrist so hard that it hurt and garble,

“Don’t go.”

She’d rid herself of panicked tears; now tears of affection threatened her instead. She repositioned herself and pressed her hand to his cheek. Overnight growth on his usually perfectly groomed facial hair tickled her palm.

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here, with you, I promise.”

He snuggled his jaw into her hand and closed his eyes and she thought her heart might overflow right there and then.

“Hello, I’m Medica Nowak. Could you explain what’s happening?” A friendly grey-haired woman crouched down next to them, and Khalila felt her sigh of relief echo through Dario.

After Khalila gave a very brief explanation and Dario had demonstrated the weaknesses of his hand and leg, and unintentionally also demonstrated being sick, he was hustled onto a transport trolley and taken down to the Medica base.

* * *

“I’ll be back in a few minutes to ask you some questions once the painkillers have had a chance to take effect,” said Medica Kelada, closing the shutters on the room Dario had been assigned to.

“Thanks,” he mumbled. He was lying on his side with a metal vomit bowl positioned in front of his face, wearing light silky hospital clothing.

“Is that better now? No sunlight?”

“Mmhm.” His eyes were tightly closed.

Khalila squeezed his hand, relieved. When they’d left the elevator and been greeted by the midday Alexandrian sun, he’d flopped over to bury his face in his bad arm and made desperate pained sounds until they’d got him inside.

As Medica Kelada left, Dario sighed and squeezed her hand back. Apparently the pain in his head ebbed and flowed, and he looked brighter right now.

“Can’t believe you left while I got changed.” In the silence of the room, and with him being decidedly calmer now, it was easier for her to make out his words.

“Well. You know.” She could hear the embarrassment in her own voice. Dario puffed air out of his nose in a low-effort laugh. It was ridiculous, she had to admit. She’d seen him topless before, multiple times. And certainly any attempt to protect Dario’s modesty was a lifetime too late. 

She brushed some of his messy hair away from his temple in order to pretend she was being useful. “Next time you’re horrendously ill, I’ll stay, then.”

His face shifted in an expression that she was starting to recognise as _ I’d be frowning if it didn’t hurt to do so _. She waited for him to try to speak again, but he just shut his eyes instead.

By the time that Medica Kelada returned, Dario was silent and inwardly focused and breathing ever so carefully, and didn’t respond beyond a grunt when the Medica announced themselves in a low but friendly tone.

“He was better a moment ago,” Khalila said, half apologetically, half defensively.

“It’s fine, dear. We’ll see what the painkillers do.”

“He’s usually quite sensitive to painkillers,” Khalila offered, watching anxiously as the Medica entered fast notes into her Codex. “Shouldn’t it have started to work by now?”

Medica Kelada raised her eyebrows and looked from Khalila to Dario with a very unimpressed expression. 

Khalila repeated her words in her head. Ah. Dario was still listening. She wasn’t being reassuring. 

“Even intravenous medication takes a non-instantaneous amount of time, Scholar Seif,” the Medica said gently. 

“Yes. Of course.” She sucked in a quick breath and folded her hands neatly in her lap. 

“It should start to take effect within the next few minutes. Shall I tell you both the plan of action, then?”

She nodded earnestly. Dario made a very faint noise.

“I’m going to ask you some questions, Scholar Santiago, and ask you to perform some movements for me. While that’s going on, we’ll be testing for a few things, and waiting for an Obscurist to become free for a test for your head.”

Khalila’s ears pricked up despite herself. 

“Obscurists? Will that necessitate transportation to the Tower?” 

It wouldn’t be Morgan they went to see, of course, but perhaps she could enquire ...

The Medica laughed as if she thought Khalila was making a slightly off-colour joke. “The Obscurists monitor the machine from their end and interpret the result, Scholar Seif.” 

Khalila frowned and her hands clenched in her lap. She’d not said anything funny.

Dario caught her gaze, and somehow managed to give her a warning look despite being barely able to open his eyes. She frowned harder, but let it go. He was right. The less they drew attention to their postulancy year (to Morgan, to Wolfe, to Jess) the better. 

“So, questions?” he asked in a thin, pained mumble. He was shifting the Medica’s focus away from Khalila. She wasn’t sure whether to scold him or hug him for it.

“If you’re ready, Scholar Santiago.”

By the time that he’d slowly sat up, he was looking brighter again. Maybe the painkillers were starting to work. He let the vomit bowl lie loose in his lap. Khalila eyed it suspiciously, and plotted how to get it to his mouth if necessary.

“Could you point to the location of the pain in your head?” 

Dario pointed to his forehead, just above his left eye, then rubbed it with his knuckle. Khalila noticed with concern that he was pressing so hard that the skin was blanching.

“Don’t do that, you’ll hurt yourself!” she protested. 

“Does that make the pain feel better?” Medica Kelada asked calmly. 

“Yeah.” Dario gave Khalila a quick little sideways look and switched to pressing with the palm of his hand. 

“What else helps?”

He raised his hand for a reprieve, and they all waited for a few moments. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “Foggy head.” He breathed in and out again. “Not moving. Not looking at light.” Looking at light came out a little sloshy, and Khalila repeated it for him. The Medica nodded at her in response, and carried on making notes.

“And how would you describe the pain? Sharp? Squeezing? Throbbing?”

“Throbbing,” Dario repeated immediately. He said something that Khalila could only figure out because she caught “better” and he indicated ‘up and down’ with his functioning hand. She opened her mouth, but the Medica beat her to it;

“It gets better and worse?”

“Mm.” Dario rubbed his head. 

“And when it’s bad, what would you rate that pain, out of 1 - 10, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the worst pain?”

Khalila was certain Dario was thinking about saying ‘ten’. Absolutely certain.

To her surprise, he said, “Eight. Or maybe nine.” He flashed the numbers on his fingers, as best as he could. “And then maybe six right now.” He glared at his hand.

“I’ll see what you can and can’t do with the numb side in a minute.” The Medica gave him an encouraging smile. 

“I thought you’d say ten,” Khalila admitted softly. Dario gave her a muted version of his wry glare, and reached over to pat her shoulder mockingly.

“This was always the only thing with numbers I was any good at, oh beautiful _ matemática _.”

“Oh, have you answered the pain scale before?” Medica Kelada had stopped looking at her notes and was spinning the pen around in her hand as she stared at Dario. 

Dario shrugged. “I had a shitty stomach a lot as a child. I saw a Medica once or twice.” 

“A painful stomach? Did this happen often? Did you vomit then, too?”

He shrugged again. His posture had suddenly turned tense, and he didn’t relax when Khalila tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow. 

“You don’t think this is a stroke, do you?” he asked. 

“I assure you we’re treating it as such.”

“But, no, you don’t.” Dario glared and clenched his jaw, then pushed hard at his forehead. When he lifted his head again, he’d gone pale.

“I’ll be able to talk with more certainty after the tests, Scholar Santiago.” 

Medica Kelada went through more questions, and then a number of movement tests. Dario’s answers were terse and low, and several times Khalila needed to nudge him to get him to respond.

“Have the painkillers stopped working?” she asked anxiously, when Medica Kelada strode off to set up the Obscurist-aided scanning machine. “You’re very quiet.”

“Mm.” It was non-committal. 

She leant both elbows on the bed to peer at him. He was slumped back against the pillows with his eyes shut, both hands curled and lax on the sheets. 

“I’m all right, flower,” he said in a flat voice, without moving more than his lips. “Getting tired and fed up. Brain’s trying to think faster than it’s capable of doing right now.” He turned his head away from her a fraction, and added, “The painkillers are working, don’t worry about that.”

His oddly bitter tone caught her off-guard. 

“That’s good news,” she said, and couldn’t prevent her own tone tilting upwards in a question. “Now we just need the scan to show you’re not in danger, and everything will be fine.”

“Everything will be back to normal again,” he said in a whisper, and the hand furthest away from her, that he might believe she couldn’t see from this angle, pulled into a quick, tight fist.

“What’s wrong, Dario?” She let her voice come out sharp. 

“Oh, come on, Khalila,” he shot back, just as aggressive through the slurring. His eyes flew open, dark and intense. “You heard all those questions. You heard my answers. Hell, you even asked me yourself in the Reading Room. You and your fucking genius brain, pattern-matching.”

She blinked at him, too confused even to feel insulted. 

He searched for the words. “You asked me whether it was my stomach thing.” A full-body shudder ran through him, and he fell silent again. 

Oh.

Well, yes. She’d seen the parallels starting to build. 

She regarded him helplessly. She had absolutely no idea what was going through his head. 

“It’s not a stroke, though, if that’s true,” she ventured. 

He sighed. She heard it catch at the back of his throat. 

“Absolutely. That’s good. Yes.” 

“You’re such a pessimist.” She tried for a jokey tone. He made a soft little sound in the back of his throat.

“I am. That’s undeniable. But … I know how this goes.” 

“How what goes?”

“This.” He made a short, jabbing motion into the air, then winced. “I know what comes next. Reduce your stress, Dario. Don’t over-medicate, Dario. Don’t be so motherfucking pathetic, Dario.” He snarled the last one. 

“Come now.” She moved to perch on the mattress next to him and soothingly rubbed one of his hands in both of hers. His fingers trembled. He’d told her a little about his family life in fits and starts over the last few months - enough that she knew she was now hearing Dario’s father filtered through his lips. “Don’t say that about yourself. Don’t you give it credence.” 

He heaved another sigh, this one with much more of an audible sobbing catch. 

“It’s a foolish precept, and you’d know it if you could be logical about it-”

“Logic’s your thing.”

She wasn’t going to let his pessimism interrupt her now:

“You’ve seen me struggle with my cramps. You know the absurd amounts of analgesic I take, every single month. I have no doubt your father would think me weak for it, Dario, but do you?”

He turned his head to meet her eyes fully for the first time in a little while. 

“Don’t use my unstinting regard of you to win the argument, desert flower. Cheap shot.”

She sat back with a frustrated sigh. He gave her a small, bitter smile. 

Medica Kelada came back before she could think of a new plan of attack. 

Apparently she wasn’t allowed to be in the room where the machine was. Something to do with quintessence backlash.

Quintessence.

The horror of their Translation into Oxford resurfaced so forcibly in her thoughts that for a moment it was all she could see in front of her. 

“Will it-” she started to say, only to overlap with Dario asking the exact same thing;

“Will it hurt?”

Medica Kelada gave them both strange looks. “Not at all.” She pushed the trolley up to Dario’s bed. “Can you transfer yourself?”

“Yes.” He did so, slowly and awkwardly with his still numb side. He looked white and dispirited, and her chest ached with helplessness. 

“We’ll be at least half an hour.” Medica Kelada looked at her piercingly. “Why don’t you go and get something to eat, Scholar Seif?”

A fair point. It had been several hours since she had eaten breakfast. More importantly though, Medica Kelada had already questioned Dario on his last meal and he’d frowned and eventually suggested “Mid afternoon yesterday?” Surely his need was more urgent than hers?

“Should I get something for Dario?” 

“Yes please!” he piped up. 

Medica Kelada rolled her eyes. “Get him something that can be kept, just in case we need to carry out further action after the scan.”

Khalila looked at Dario. Dario looked back at Khalila. 

“Don’t you dare get me those fucking date bars, flower.”

Glain had introduced them all to the dried compressed date bars during their postulancy. Apparently they were a common element in High Garda ration packs. Very used to the taste from breaking her fast during Ramadan, Khalila had taken to them immediately as a low-effort food, but Dario … had not. 

She grinned so widely that it hurt, pleased to have even a fragment of his normal humour back. “I’ll get you a lamb gyros,” she offered. “You eat them cold.”

Mindful of the delay they had already encountered with this strange Obscurist machine, Khalila slowly ate her favourite martabak from a nearby stall and then went into the main food district to buy Dario’s gyros from the vendor she knew he preferred. There was no need for her to rush back straight on the half hour mark.

It was distracting, in a good and necessary way, to walk in the bright afternoon sunlight and watch the everyday comings and goings of passers-by. So different from the amber light of the Reading Room, and the enforced dusk of Dario’s hospital bed that had made up her day so far. The strong smells of street food and sounds of conversation all helped to soften the cold stone of fear that had lodged itself in her stomach. 

The familiar call to prayer intruded upon her quiet meanderings. Midday. 

She walked a little further, until she could see one of the large public clocks that hung on most Alexandrian streets. 

No, she didn’t have a great deal of time left before Dario should be out of the scan. Given the situation, she felt as though she would need a long prayer time today. It would be better to pray after seeing Dario again, rather than force herself to wrestle unduly with mental focus.

Provided Dario was still well enough to see her, and that the scan didn’t immediately reveal terrible things. Oh dear.

She wandered back down the wide street, trying to recapture her lost feeling of gentle distraction. When that failed, she tamed her anxious brain by the tried and tested technique of reciting a few sets of facts, then started mentally rewriting her most recent paper’s conclusion. That helped. 

In the end, she returned after forty-five minutes away, thinking that fifteen minutes was a reasonable length of time to expect a delay. 

The room was still empty.

Panic seized her by the throat and shook her, and she had to take several steps back to brace herself securely against the wall. All her hard-won calm flickered away in an instant.

The drawn shutters made it look so very ominous. 

He is fine, she told herself briskly. He’ll be back any moment now, if Allah wills it. You’re letting your imagination get the better of you. Now is not the time for that.

Over the sound of her heartbeat in her ears, she heard footsteps coming down the corridor. 

Relief lightened her heart and made her smile as she saw Medica Kelada and Dario approach - only for her heart to curl and drop like a stone when she saw that Dario had his eyes closed and was lying still.

“Is he -” 

“It’s all right, dear,” Medica Kelada called with a smile. “He drifted off to sleep in the machine.

“Oh.” She giggled, a little too high-pitched. “Did that cause a problem?”

“Perhaps very mildly, with the final image. The Obscurist thought it would be fine.” 

Dario stirred as she reached them, turning his head on the pillow and sighing.

“Oh, good,” Medica Kelada said. “Stay awake, dear. You can get yourself back into bed.”

Dario blinked and made a faint protesting noise. 

Khalila dashed ahead and held the door. Dario saw her as he was pushed through, and his eyes lit up. 

He grumbled when the Medica made him roll onto the bed himself, and mumbled … well, there was probably more than one swearword in there, but Khalila only caught one. 

“Dario,” she said. He opened one eye to look at her. In the dim light and against his pale face, the iris looked very black. 

“S’rry.”

“I’ll pop back when the results are ready,” the Medica said. “Feel free to go back to sleep, Scholar Santiago. If you need more painkillers, just ring the bell.”

“_ Feel free to go back to sleep _,” Dario muttered sarcastically into his pillow as she left. “Mmph. Fuck.”

Khalila laughed under her breath, and watched Dario grumpily settle himself. 

His hospital shirt had been tugged askew, and she could see something sticky on his bare chest. Just about where his Oxford tattoo was. 

She couldn’t make it out from this distance, but she had listened to Dario brainstorm ideas and been there to watch its creation. She knew the artwork well: the date that they had all been plunged into that warzone, surrounded by eight dots. Four brown - her, Dario, Jess, Glain. Two red - Portero and Danton. One gold - Morgan. One purple - Thomas. 

It was simple, because it wasn’t meant for anyone who wouldn’t have known exactly what it was just by looking. Which, she supposed, these days, was just her, though she still clung to the hope that they would eventually reunite with Jess and Glain.

Her face scrunched involuntarily as she remembered the _ other _ tattoo, on the left-hand side of his chest. It was the opposite of simple. In fact it was ornate enough that the twisted golden ‘K’ wasn’t immediately recognisable. It just ... made her uncomfortable. It felt like overconfidence on his part. Impulsivity. Melodrama.

Very Dario. 

“Do you want food now, or after you’ve slept?” she asked, and felt awful when Dario jumped at the sound of her voice.

''Later,'' he mumbled. ''Still feel sick.''

She walked towards him and put the gyros on the bedside shelf. ''There you go. I'll be back in a bit.''

''No, where are you going?'' He pushed himself up on one elbow. The whites of his eyes were practically luminous in the gloom. 

''Just to pray in the corridor.''

He frowned. ''Do it here. I'll be quiet.'' It came out a fretful whinel. 

She stretched out her hand and put it next to him. It was something she’d noticed from the very first time she’d allowed him to touch her; he often made contact that looked like it was meant to soothe her but in reality was acting as self-comfort. 

Sure enough, he covered her hand with his own and ran his thumb repetitively over the back of her hand.

'We'd both be distracted if I prayed here,” she said gently. “You need to rest. You're not yourself.''

''No, but… I… Khalila…'' He buried his face fully in the pillow for a moment, then turned his face towards her and removed his hand from hers. ''Sorry. You're right.” He mumbled something vehemently in Spanish. It sounded a bit too vicious for her liking; she suspected it was directed at himself. 

“Of course I’m right,” she said, to try and prompt him into a retort. He made a thin, single note of acknowledgement. She sighed and put a hand between his shoulder-blades. His muscles there were taut. “I’ll wash in here.” She’d intended to just perform a dry ablution outside; this felt like a compromise. 

He made another soft agreeing sound, and obediently turned his face away from the side of the room with the faucet. 

“Thank you,” she said, softly, surprised he’d remembered in his state when they’d only discussed the steps for her purification procedure once before. 

Once she’d washed, she told him, “Go to sleep,” and tried to open and close the door behind her as quietly as possible. 

Medica Kelada came down the corridor during her prayer, and although the Medica smiled and ducked quietly into Dario’s room, Khalila’s blood went icy with adrenalin and it took every ounce of self-control she had to force herself not to interrupt herself, or to unacceptably rush the final seated stage.

_ Answers _. 

When she entered the room again, in a much less centred state than she usually achieved after praying, she could feel the tension. She flew to sit next to Dario, and it was a flat draw as to who reached for whose hand first. 

The medication conduits were no longer stuck in his arms, she noticed. He had little dressings on his arms instead. 

“Oh good, you’re here.” Medica Kelada looked immune to the nerves in the room, and Khalila drew strength from the older woman’s easy smile and posture. “I’ll start with the important news first: you’re not having a stroke, Scholar Santiago.”

“_ Alhamdulillah _,” Khaliila said, earnestly and instinctively giving praise to Allah, at the same time that Dario said,

“Yes, we’d all figured that one out, I think.”

She stared at him. His dark gaze was fixed on the Medica, flat and sharp, and despite being slumped back against three pillows he was giving the impression of someone leaning forwards aggressively. 

“Dario!”

He looked at her, briefly, then away again. There was a terrifying blankness behind his eyes that made her want to shake him just to provoke a reaction. 

“So what’s your expert opinion on my state of mind then, Medica Kelada?” The use of her title somehow only accentuated the disrespect in his tone. His hand had gone lax in Khalila’s grip. 

Medica Kelada’s gaze flickered to Khalila, just for a moment, and Khaliila scrambled to think of how to explain the scattered pieces she knew of this jigsaw, of what Dario feared hearing. Before she could do more than open her mouth, the Medica’s gaze refocused on Dario.

“I’m not qualified to judge people’s state of mind, Scholar Santiago. Would you like to hear your medical diagnosis?”

That threw him. He sucked in a breath and made a sound as if to speak, before changing his mind. HIs hand twisted into Khalila’s again, squeezing tightly. 

“Please,” Khalila said, on his behalf. 

“I still need to get a few test results back to be certain, but I’m confident in saying that you’ve had a migraine.”

Khalila didn’t recognise the word, at all. She looked over at Dario, who was frowning. He said a word in Spanish which sounded similar. She reached for her Codex to bring up a dictionary. It had been a long time since she’d needed to look up a Greek term. How embarrassing. 

“Like, a headache with vomiting,” Dario explained when Khalila caught his eye. The defensiveness had drained straight out of his posture, and if anything he just looked puzzled. 

“That’s not quite-”

“But what about the-”

Khalila and Medica Kelada looked at each other, and Khalila frantically gestured for the Medica to go first.

“Were you going to ask about the right-hand weakness?” Medica Kelada asked. Khalila nodded.

“And the speech problem.” Which, luckily, seemed to be receding with the worst of the headache. 

Medica Kelada nodded. “It’s all part and parcel of the same thing. Most people don’t realise that a migraine is more than a bad headache; it’s a neurological disorder, and it can have a variety of symptoms.”

They discussed it for a while longer. Apparently it was common for certain symptoms to start long before the pain. Dario nodded and raised his hand, which was still a little clumsy. But Khalila shook her head. 

“She said a while before. You probably only had that, perhaps ten minutes before you started being sick? But you felt disproportionately tired and foggy-headed all morning, didn’t you?”

Dario blinked at her. “Oh, yes. I’d forgotten.”

Medica Kelada scribbled a note of that, and asked for more detail. Between the two of them, they put together a better picture of the progression of symptoms throughout the morning than Khalila had managed in the initial panicked admission. 

“A neurological disorder.” Dario sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I can’t decide whether my father’s going to call it ‘just a headache’, or ‘a defective mind’.” He looked white and tired again, the little energy he’d gained from his nap visibly fading away. “So how is it treated?” 

“Much like we’ve done today, although with fewer disturbances, ideally! Get some painkillers down you, and lie down in the dark to try and sleep.”

“So there’s -”

“But isn’t that-”

Dario indicated Khalila should go first. She demurred, because given the second’s pause to consider her words, she was absolutely certain that asking So, there’s no cure? wouldn’t be helpful. 

“How often will these migraines happen?” Dario asked. 

“It varies from person to person. Once or twice a month is the average, I’d say. Why?”

He chewed his lower lip. “I was always told to minimise painkiller usage. It can cause reliance. Addiction.”

His gaze flickered to Khalila for the briefest moment, and she felt the breath leave her lungs.

_ Do you think i’m addicted _ , _ Dario? _ That … that was going to have to be a conversation at some point.

So when she’d tried to use herself as an example earlier ...

_ Your unstinting regard for me, indeed _ , she thought, with a hot blaze of anger. _ This might be worse than my uncle’s disdain for the subject. _

It took her a moment to get herself back together after that, and she missed the first part of Medica Kelada’s response.

“... certainly if you start needing the painkillers very regularly, you should come and talk to us and we can try to figure out what is happening.”

Dario laughed. It didn’t sound right. “Everyone always said I had an addictive personality.” He took his hand out of Khalila’s and drew up his legs, cupping his hands over his knees. “What counts as ‘very regularly,’ then? More than once a month?”

“Goodness me, no, you’ve got a lot more leeway than that with the painkillers you’re on right now. I wouldn’t be at all worried about taking it once a week, for example. That would be a worrying migraine frequency, though. Do you see the difference?”

“Mm.” Dario rubbed his forehead. “I suppose I must have been on different painkillers when I was younger. Stronger ones that required more safeguards.”

“For your stomach aches?” Medica Kelada studied her notes. “I think those might have been a form of childhood migraine.”

_ Yes _ , Khalila thought, _ that would make sense. That would explain why elements match _. 

“They were _ stomach aches _.” Dario’s voice was suddenly scathing again; it made Khalila jump. “Now you’re just looking for things to fit your fucking theories.” His hands gripped his knees tightly. “Did you not even read my previous Medica notes? I know it’s in there. Weak stomach. Easily overwhelmed.”

Medica Kelada tilted her head to the side. “I have read your notes and I have some questions prepared for your previous Medica, but I assure you, I am fairly confident in my diagnosis.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Dario muttered. He put his arms around himself. Khalila watched this, alarmed, and reached for his shoulder. To her horror, he flinched away from her touch.

“Dario?” The Medica’s sudden use of his first name surprised Khalila, but Dario didn't even seem to notice. “Could you help us understand what has upset you?”

Normally, sensing Dario’s mind at work was exciting - a sign that he was really focusing. But his time, it looked awful, like he was dragging his intellect through sticky clay by sheer willpower. She watched his jaw clench and loosen, and heard him sigh. 

“If they were just migraines,” he said at last, “is the treatment the same? Bed? Painkillers?”

“Yes.”

Dario’s entire body twitched. A few tense, silent seconds later, he said, “I’m going to be sick.”

Khalila hurriedly passed him the bowl. He retched, but nothing came up, not even the bile he’d been producing earlier. He did it again. By the third equally unproductive time, he was shivering and panting. 

“Dario.” Khalila moved the vomit bowl from his hands to beside his leg and put a firm arm around his shoulders. “Breathe. Just breathe.” To her utmost relief, he leaned against her, head tucked against her shoulder. “There we go.” She kissed the top of his head. “You’re not going to be sick.” She met Medica Kelada’s gaze. “He’s not been entirely transparent. From what I understand, his access to painkillers as a child wasn’t just minimised, it was minimal. Paltry.”

Medica Kelada pulled a face at her, and indicated her Codex very slightly. She’d known. It was in the notes. But in what form, Khalila wondered?

“Bed rest and painkillers,” Dario mumbled. “Medically prescribed.”He sat upright again, pushing to get free of her grip. “I used to_ beg _ to be allowed to lie down.” He let out a sound so unlike a laugh that it made Khalila’s skin crawl. “It wasn’t as good as the painkillers I knew were ‘bad for me’, but it was better than nothing.”

She stared at his new position. Curled in a ball, with his arms wrapped around his legs, yanking them tightly against his chest. Forehead resting on his knees. 

_ This is how you sat _ , she thought, and felt sick herself. _ This is how you sat, when you were a child and no-one would help you _. 

“But everyone had their orders.” He pulled himself even tighter into a ball. “I remember once I was crying during a geography lesson, and the tutor, he just said, ‘Oh yes, your father told me about this.’ And he put a bucket in front of me. To catch the vomit that we both knew was coming. And he said, come on, Santiago, you know that it’ll pass. And it did. It always did.” He nodded to himself. “Eventually.”

That was a large step too far for Khalla to bear. She couldn’t tell whether the tears blurring her vision and the giant lump in her chest were from horror or fury. 

She wrapped her arms around Dario again, and after a quick, tense moment, he let her. 

“It’s all right,” she whispered. It was a stupid thing to say, but her mind was too busy replaying his words to find space for new ones. 

He wrenched away from her. “No, it’s fucking not!” He grabbed the empty vomit bowl and hurled it into the wall with a thud. It left a mark.

Khalila’s gasp sounded very loud in the awful silence that followed.

He shivered all over, and mumbled, “Sorry,” to neither of them in particular. 

“Do you feel like you’re going to do that again?” Medica Kelada asked calmly.

Dario dragged his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“That’s not an answer to the question I just asked.”

He glared at her. “I won’t do it again, all right?”

“You’re allowed to be angry.”

“Oh, fuck off.” His hand tightened in his hair. “You already said state of mind wasn’t your speciality.”

Khalila risked putting her hand back onto his trembling shoulder. He put his arm around her this time, rather than the other way around, and although she instantly seized control of her breathing, she wasn’t good enough at it. 

“_ Dios, _ don’t cry, flower.” He gently touched his forehead to the side of her head. “I’m sorry. Don’t listen to me. I’m just making a fuss.” 

“No, you’re not. That’s not how you help a child in pain, Dario,” Medica Kelada said gently. “Something went wrong.”

Dario made a neutral sound of acknowledgement. He rubbed Khalila’s back and looked at her wet face with a doleful expression that made her pull herself together.

“I don't _ want _to cry about it,” she assured him, sniffing hard. “I want to stab your father in the thigh and make him walk on it for the rest of his life.”

That shocked a laugh out of him, and he looked at her in that wondering way he had when she surprised him. 

“I’d like to watch that.” He rubbed his eyes, and she pretended not to notice that his hand came away wet. 

Medica Kelada politely handed Khlila some tissues as she stood up, and Khalila let one fall onto Dario’s lap as if by accident. She wiped her eyes, and Dario blew his nose loudly. 

The simmering rage in her chest slowly cooled enough to let her breathe again. She reached up to tangle her hand in his hair, but pulled away when he flinched.

He grabbed her hand and put it back.

She could see the hairs rising on his arms at her touch, and tried to pull her hand away. “No, Dario, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’re not.” There was something very odd in his still-wet eyes. “Keep going.”

So she did. Watched the hairs gradually lie flat again as she dragged her blunt fingernails against his scalp. Stared at him until he met her eyes. 

“It’s just…” He puffed out a sigh and rubbed his forehead. “When I was very young, before … when it was still something I might grow out of, when I was still small enough to be ‘sweet’ when I was ill, my mother used to stroke my head. And it was awful.”

Khlila laughed out of sheer surprise. Dario’s eyes crinkled in a small smile. 

“She was too soft. It tickled. I get really sensitive to touch when I’m in pain. So then I was an ungrateful brat, too. _ But _,” he said, quickly, gripping Khalila’s wrist like he thought she might take it away again, “you’re not too soft.” He gave her a look full of such adoration that she nearly started crying again, and said softly, “You have spikes.”

They cuddled in silence after that, and Khalila watched his hands gradually stop trembling. 

Dario was the first to sigh, though, a wobbly sound. 

“_ Joder _, I’m tired.” His voice cracked. “Can I go?” He looked at Medica Kelada, who was on the other side of the room, ostensibly sorting out the bags which had been connected to Dario but clearly trying to give them privacy.

The Medica frowned. “Why not rest here for a little while? No-one needs this bed right now.”

He shook his head. “Own bed. You know.”

Khalila leaned over to grab the discarded gyros from the bedside shelf. “Eat this first,” she said, plopping it on his lap. “I’m not strong enough to catch you when you faint.”

“You’re plenty strong enough. And I won’t faint,” he mumbled, unwrapping the meat and bread and regarding it unenthusiastically. 

Medica Kelada grinned at them. Maybe she too was relieved to see Dario regain his composure enough to snipe back. “I’ll order you a carriage, and get your painkillers sorted. I’ll send you both some reputable literature on migraines too.”

Was it Khalila’s imagination, or was there the slightest emphasis on ‘reputable’ there? She tried to catch Medica Kelada’s eye, but the Medica swept out too quickly. 

“Do I have to eat it?” Dario complained once the Medica had gone. 

“Yes.” Khalila snuggled up next to him and popped a bit of lamb into her mouth. “I’ll help.” It wasn’t very tasty, cold, but she ate it anyway.

He eyed her. “Is that-”

“It’s halal.” She took another piece. “I asked.”

“Right. Good.” Still he stared at it like it might be poisoned. 

“If you still feel sick, it’s likely to be because you’ve not eaten anything in an entire day,” she pointed out. 

He sighed and leaned his head back against the pillow. 

“You’re just manipulating me into doing this,” she said in a deliberately matter of fact tone, picking up a sauce-smeared piece and holding it near his face. 

He blinked at it and then looked at her in disbelief and laughed weakly. “I would never dream to presume -”

“Less talking, more chewing.” She flicked the lamb against his cheek. He opened his mouth and let her drop the food in. He stuck his tongue out to try and catch her fingers, and she poked his cheek gently in retaliation.

His eyes widened as he chewed. “Oh shit, you were right. I’m actually hungry.”

“I’m always right,” she replied, and watched with satisfaction as he began eating properly. 

The food gave Dario a burst of energy (fancy that), and it took all of Khalila’s powers of persuasion to make him get into the waiting carriage rather than walk back to his room. Luckily by the time they arrived at the residential levels of the Serapeum, he was yawning and leaning on her and thoroughly willing to take the lift. 

But he got steadily quieter, too, and harder to prompt a response from. 

“Are you going back to the Reading Room?” he said out of the blue, as the lift climbed. “You’ve got Archytas until midnight.”

“Yes, I think so. Do you want me to keep an eye on anything for you?”

He stared at the lift wall for a while, then shrugged apathetically. 

By the time they walked down his corridor, he was juddering aimlessly between her supporting arm and the wall. 

“You’ll be all right?” she asked anxiously, taking his face in her hands as they stood in front of his door. There were visible shadows under his eyes, and although he insisted the headache was gone, he kept running his fingers over one eyebrow. 

He gave her a crooked smile. “Going to come in and put me to bed as well?”

“In your dreams.”

“Oh, it will be.” He leered. She rolled her eyes, grabbed his wrist and touched his band against the door to unlock it.

“As if you’ll have the energy for that.” She pushed the door open.

“It’s not even evening. It’s broad daylight. This is going to destroy my sleep pattern.”

“Stop it.” She cupped his face again. His expression softened and he took a deep breath in and out. 

“Anything for you,” he said as he turned to walk through the door.

“You have to get the last word, don’t you?” she whispered, just loudly enough for him to hear.

“It’s one of my gifts, flower,” he said with a too-wide smile, as he swung the door shut in her face.

* * *

Three hours later, Khalila’s Codex chimed. It broke her concentration yet again. Not that that was difficult right now. She hadn’t been able to stop worrying about everything that had happened. 

“What a waste of you,” she said, only half-joking, to the manuscript in front of her. With a sigh, she flipped her Codex open.

She recognised the handwriting immediately, and her heart jolted in her chest. It was from Dario.

Within the space of a blink she knew that something was very wrong. The fragmented message was written at an angle, as if he hadn’t noticed that his writing surface had suddenly changed, in Spanish, in the worst handwriting she’d ever seen from him. 

For a guilty moment she stared at the message, trying to translate it using her Portugese knowledge. The two languages shared a lot of vocabulary, although there were many irritating false cognates to trip her up. This was short and simple. Most of it was taken up with something that looked very much like a blasphemous swearword. 

Then she shut the Codex. She had more important things to be puzzling out. Such as, why on earth was Dario even awake to scrawl angry messages to unknown Spanish receivers? 

She eyed the manuscript in front of her for a moment, then gave up and carefully prepared it to be returned to storage. Somehow she didn’t think she’d be making the most of her remaining allotted hours.

She didn't ever go to his room after nightfall. It was one of her rules. She tried not to visit it at all, in fact. Some assumptions were all too easily made about two very young Scholars who had an understanding. 

Dario insisted that no-one else would notice or care, but, well, Dario was male. Some things were more easily forgiven in a man.

Every step in that direction was a little, scolding tug in her chest, to the point where she stopped on the floor below and had a stern talk with herself. 

This was not a view she, herself, held. She knew that going to Dario’s room was an entirely chaste action, motivated in this case by worry. 

If it wasn’t chaste - that was _ her _ temptation to manage. Hers and Dario’s, and no-one else’s except for Allah. 

And if she was seen? And rumours spread among the young Scholars they socialised with? If rumours reached her family? 

Well, then, she would just have to prepare for a long discussion. 

The last thing that she wanted to do was disturb him if he was trying to go back to sleep, so she knocked very quietly on his door. The door opened within seconds. 

"Khalila." He blinked at her, confused.

She was right to come; he looked terrible. Not as bad as he had earlier, but that was a very low bar to reach. 

His face was pale and drawn, and those dark smudges under his eyes hadn’t improved. His hair was a mess, like he'd been fiddling with it constantly, and he was still wearing the silky hospital garments. He was barefoot, which was simultaneously sweet and jarring for its unfamiliarity.

Most worryingly, his hands and face were covered with spatters of ink. That message she’d seen hadn’t been the first message he’d written. 

"What can I do for you at this late hour, my beauteous rose?" He ducked his head briefly. The strain in his polite tone made her heart clench. 

"Can I come in?" she asked. Despite herself, she dropped her voice and looked up the corridor as she asked. He rolled his eyes, but stood back to let her in. 

A brief survey of his room told her that he had at least tried to find sleep; the blinds were pulled tightly closed against the bright afternoon sun and his bedsheets were in disarray. 

(Admittedly, that last wasn’t always a guarantee with Dario, whose idea of making his own bed was ‘Are the pillows and sheets still on the bed? Then it’s fine’.)

A bright glow hung over his desk in the corner of the room. The desk itself was a mess; it was covered in sheets of crumpled, wasted paper; an upended not quite empty ink pot; and three badly-treated Blanks. Many of the visible sheets were covered in violent over-inked scribbles, presumably to erase their contents. The chair had been haphazardly scraped back and forth, judging by the clear scuff marks on the plush carpet.

She was relieved to see that there was an empty glass on the desk; Medica Kelada had thoroughly drilled into them both the importance of Dario staying hydrated. 

"Sorry, _ querida _,” Dario said lightly from behind her, “but if a migraine is the price I pay for getting you into my room at last then it won't be happening as often as I'd like - "

"Dario.” 

He fell silent. She turned to face him. He gave her a quick, apologetic little smile. 

“Are you all right with me closing the door?” he asked. “It’s letting in the cold.” His hand was already on the doorknob, but he waited for her response.

Cold? If anything it was positively stifling in here. 

“You can close it, thank you.” For all the difference it would make now. "You promised me you would rest," she said, trying her very best to keep the probably patronising concern from her voice. He couldn’t have snatched much sleep, if he was still so tired that he felt a non-existent chill. 

“I did,” he said. “Rest, I mean. I promised and I rested.” He rubbed his face. When he took his hands away, he had new ink smudges on his cheeks. Khalila wanted to kiss them away. More importantly, she noted the immediate evidence of his unfocused thoughts in his woozy speech. “But then there was a noise and I woke up. And I felt a bit better and realised that there were things I should probably be doing.” He gestured aimlessly towards the desk. 

“What things needed to be done?” Khalila held out her hands to him. He needed to sit down, at a minimum. “Nothing is urgent, right now.”

He stared at her hands with a bewildered look on his face. “I’ll get ink all over you.”

She rolled her eyes. "Dario, if I were worried about ink stains, I would have picked a different career path." She thrust her hands out more fiercely and waited until he gave in. “Sit on the bed. I’ll sit on the chair. We can talk then.”

He let her lead him for a step or two, then his brain clearly caught up with her words. He stopped and gave her a panicked look. 

“No. I’ll sit at the desk.” He tried to pull away, but she held his hands tightly. 

“I promise I won’t read anything that you’ve written.” 

He looked relieved. That instantly made her feel guilty. 

“Although, I admit, I’ve seen something already. That’s why I'm here.”

To her surprise, rather than confusion, Dario’s face sagged with even more relief. 

“Oh. That went to you. The thing.” He flapped his hands together, which, after some squinting between him and the desk and the memories of her own Codex, Khalila realised was an imitation of the piece of paper he’d been writing on overlapping with the Codex message page, just like she’d thought. “Sorry. That was rude, wasn’t it?” He chuckled. 

Khalila could recognise a distraction when it was being waved in front of her face. “Who did you think you’d sent that message to, Dario? Who did you write it for?”

Dario avoided her eyes. “I’ll tidy up the desk.” He yanked his hands free. She winced, not because it had hurt her, but because it looked like it might have hurt him.

“Was it your father?” she called after him.

“What if it was?” he snapped back, as he shoved bits of paper underneath each other. “I didn’t send it. I’m not fucking stupid. I’m allowed to want to tell him he’s a ... to tell him I’m angry, when he told me something was all in my head for my entire life and he was _ wrong _.” 

He pushed his clenched fists against the desk as he said the last word, his entire body tense. Then he sighed. “Anyway. That wasn’t what I _ wanted _ to do. That was just … it just happened. You can read these, if you want. These are good.” He patted the top of the pile he’d created, then walked to the bed and sat down heavily.

“Thank you,” Khalila said automatically, while wondering what on earth he’d written. She sat down on the desk chair, and felt a very fresh ink stain start seeping into her dress at the back of her thigh. Lovely. 

They were lists. She leafed through them quickly. What to do if he had a migraine at certain times of the day. A step-by-step plan of how to get more painkillers when he ran out. A copy of what looked like one-handed fingerspelling. 

The content was sound, but he kept muddling his words. Entire sentences were ungrammatical, or contained other sentence fragments, or were just undecipherable. 

She looked up at him. He turned red under her curious gaze. It didn’t make him look any healthier. If anything it made him looked feverish.

“Why did you feel these needed to be composed now?” she asked again. He shrugged and stared at the floor.

“I was worrying about it all anyway. I thought I might as well write it down. That usually helps if my brain gets a bit ...” He spun his finger round a few times, then winced. “Sorry.”

“Why?” She leaned forwards. Her fingers curled around the edge of the table. “You don’t have to apologise to me for talking about how you feel.”

He swallowed and ran his fingers through his hair. “Mm.” 

“Dario?” She craned her neck and folded herself almost completely in half to try and find his gaze. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Sorry.”

“Stop apologising.”

His gaze snapped to hers, just for a moment, and she seized the opportunity. 

“What’s wrong? We’ve spoken enough about worries, haven’t we? All those late-night messages?” She wanted to hold his twitchy hands so badly that hers own ached. “We’ve discussed the way Oxford lingers. Grief. Worries about Morgan, and Scholar Wolfe, and Jess.”

“Your worries about Jess.”

She let him have that, just for the brief spark of life it imbued him with. 

“So why didn’t you send me a message? Why did you sit here and worry until you couldn’t stop?” She could hear her voice starting to catch; it was just such a horrible picture. Him curled up in the dark, letting his thoughts run amok. “And some of these plans are unnecessarily overcomplicated, because they rely only on you.“ She shook her head. “It’s like …” She trailed off again, as her sentence completed in her head: _ it’s like you didn’t even think to ask for help _. “There are other people in the world apart from your magnificent self, you know,” she finished, lamely. 

Dario scoffed. “I can stand on my own two feet.” As if to prove it, he pushed himself to his feet.

_ That’s not you _ , she thought. _ That’s your father speaking _. 

“But you don’t have to, Dario!” she said earnestly. “I understand. It’s easier to carry on doing the same things than it is to take a risk.”

He glared at her, but she barrelled ahead. It was difficult not to take Dario not thinking to ask her for help as an insult.

““When we agreed to form this understanding between us, you promised me that you were not thinking of a fleeting dalliance, and I promised, too, to pursue this beyond temporary difficulties.”

He nodded, slowly. 

“I trusted that you would hold to your word. That was the risk I took. Why, then, won’t let yourself trust my word?”

He frowned and looked confused. The glow over the desk flickered, shifting both of their attention for a moment. That reminded her of the pile of plans in front of her, and one in particular that had snagged her eye.

“Dario, there is a piece of paper in here,” she started rooting through the pile to find it again, and watched him grow more and more alarmed, “which details what you should do if a migraine forces you to cancel an outing with me. It involves several steps and they’re all utter nonsense. What should you _ actually _ do if that happens?”

He frowned at her, and her temper slipped its leash. “You tell me, you idiot! Let me help!” She slapped her palm against the table as she raised her voice. 

“A permanent neurological disorder isn’t a ‘temporary difficulty’, Khalila.” Dario paced his half of the room in three aggravated steps. 

“So you_ don’t _ trust me to hold up my side of our understanding?”

“Maybe I don’t!” He rubbed his upper arms like he was feeling cold again. She could tell his mind was working, so she stayed silent to let him think. “This is something new, and it changes how I see myself.”

She nodded. Her heart was beating rapidly in her ears. 

“I’ve never been able to balance the scales anyway, to figure out why you agreed to ... “ He swung back to the bed and gripped the bedpost. “So I can’t figure it out.” 

Khalila stood and walked to him. He was significantly taller than her, but he looked small, somehow. She understood a little more now.

“I’m not going anywhere.” She held his face in both her hands. He blinked, slowly, like it was an effort. “This doesn’t change anything in how I see you.” She slid both hands up into his hair and pulled until his forehead rested against hers. Their lips were millimetres apart. “You don’t have to do this alone anymore, Dario.”

“Sorry,” he murmured. She could feel the word against her lips. “Khalila.” Her name, like a prayer. He put his arms around her, warm and tight, pulling their bodies flush together. 

Heat flooded her from head to foot at his proximity. The sensation of his body pressing against hers, all the way up and down. She couldn’t hide the change in her breathing from him, not here. 

He was watching her lips, with his beautiful dark eyes and his long eyelashes, and she wanted to edge their mouths together so much that she burnt with it.

He was standing perfectly still, she realised, as she struggled with herself. He had no reason to resist this pull, other than … other than his respect for her. Other than their understanding.

Embarrassment over her outburst added an unpleasant layer to the heat suffusing her. 

Who was she, to think that he could override the safety mechanisms of a lifetime within a day, just for her?

How much had she overreacted to a silly, private thing that he’d written to make himself feel better?

“No,_ I’m _ sorry.” She rubbed her thumbs over his cheekbones. They tingled. “I did this wrong, I think. We should have this conversation again later.” She breathed in, to fortify herself, then released her grip on Dario’s hair and stepped away. He looked at her with naked disappointment, and she wasn’t at all sure that she was masking her own either.

“Later,” he repeated, then sighed through pursed lips.

“Go to bed.”

He gave her a pale imitation of his usual grin. “Pretend I’ve said a really clever and irritating pun combining that with you just saying ‘“You don’t have to do this alone anymore’, please.”

She grinned back. It was wobbly, and she was still breathing just a touch faster than before. “Absolutely not.” She cast a glance around the room, and found a perfect excuse. “I’ll get you some more water from the bathroom. You get into bed.” 

By the time that she’d collected herself, avoiding looking at herself in the mirror, and walked back into the bedroom, he was curled up under the covers. She passed him the drink and, after a second, sat down next to him. 

“I really am sorry.” Her hands gripped each other tightly in her lap. “I was an idiot, not you.”

He yawned. “It’s all right, flower. I was an idiot, you were an idiot. It's been a fucking shitty day. And anyway.” He tugged one of her wrists until he relented and let him hold her hand. “It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who gets insecure about us sometimes.”

She stared at the carpet in front of her, which blurred with yet more tears, and nodded and squeezed his hand back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I hope people enjoyed at least some of that. Let me know.

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of ... a symbol? for how I think they did end up drawn together in canon, which of course, we don't get to see. I think late night conversations were involved, and I think that just about the only thing other than sheer physical attractiveness that Dario might have been able to offer her is to lower his scheming, power-playing mask and let her see some honesty. I think she'd probably be fairly flattered by the implication of "I've never said/shown this stuff to anyone before." 
> 
> This is actually set on a specific night, if anyone cares: the night before Morgan arrives, which is most likely the same night that Dario and Jess play Go.
> 
> Why that specific night? Because that next morning:
> 
> "Disappointingly, Dario somehow made it downstairs and outside just in time."
> 
> lol Khalila, that was too strong.


End file.
